School Readiness, Academic Achievement, and Externalizing Behaviors: The Importance of Considering Developmental Trajectories

Academic achievement is an important long-term predictor of quality of life and is linked with other psychosocial health outcomes. The transition to elementary school has been found to be an integral period for the development of the needed skills for long term academic success. Thus, research has begun to emphasize the importance of school readiness. However, many studies have ignored socioemotional predictors (i.e., social skills, prosocial behaviors, externalizing behaviors, etc.) of academic achievement, in favor of indicators linked with cognitive readiness (i.e., language abilities, estimation, reasoning, etc.).   The purpose of this proposal is to explore the relation between longitudinal changes in externalizing behaviors and academic achievement, after controlling for covariates associated with cognitive skills.

Data for this proposal were analyzed from two large nationally representative data sets, the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N= 1,364)and the NCES Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (N=21,260). It was hypothesized that there would be latent sub-populations with different externalizing behaviors trajectories. Students with consistently high levels of externalizing behaviors or accelerating behaviors would demonstrate lower achievement scores than peers with other trajectories. The analyses used teacher report of externalizing behaviors, standardized measures of academic achievement, and teacher report of academic achievement. General Growth Mixture Modeling in Mplus v5.2 (Muthén & Muthén, 2008) was used to answer these questions. Across both data sets, the results suggested that children whose externalizing behaviors were consistently elevated tended to have poorer mathematics and reading achievement in comparison to peers with low or declining levels of externalizing behaviors.  Children with accelerating externalizing problems had higher achievement scores in comparison to their peers, but only when cognitive readiness covariates were included in the model.

These findings underpin the need for a whole child approach to school readiness that considers multiple aspects of development and linkages with school readiness. Furthermore, these results emphasize the importance of considering developmental trajectories when linking externalizing behaviors and academic achievement. (or any developmental competencies). The presentation at the 2013 Society for Prevention Research will further explain our analytical procedure, as well as consider other potential recommendations for prevention policy and practice.